The Electronic Communications Privacy Act turns 40 this year, and it's showing its age.

On Friday, March 6th, Lawfare and Georgetown Law are bringing together leading scholars,

practitioners, and former government officials for installing updates to ECPA, a half-day event

on what's broken with the statute and how to fix it. The event is free and open to the public,

in person and online. Visit lawfaremedia.org slash ECPA event. That's lawfaremedia.org

slash ECPA event for details and to register. The point is you wanted to do this quickly and publicly, again, to communicate to people who might contemplate transgression, vigilanteism, on his behalf that if they align themselves with Maga, then there is protection waiting for them at the end of any adverse

criminal consequence.

It's the Lawfare podcast.

I'm Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare, and I'm with Lee Kavarski, an endowed chair

professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

It seems like none of these people are all that worried about disobeying court orders,

about ignoring rules.

And some of that's because they know they're not going to be prosecuted by the Trump

Justice Department.

And another piece of it is probably because they know they're going to get a blanket

pardon when Trump leaves office.

Today we're talking about patronage pardons.

That is, pardons that are president grants in order to excuse and maybe even induce criminality by his political supporters.

So, Lee, you have a very interesting new article coming out in the Duke Law Journal called

patronage pardons. What is a patronage pardon? A patronage pardon is a concept that I came up with.

I need a snazzy buzzword for it. But the idea is that it's a pardon that serves a dual function.

Not only does it spare, it's recipient from criminal punishment, but it also operates as a form of communication to people who might be contemplating transgression on behalf of the president's behalf.

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